Slower Loading Sites Will Soon Be Less Likely to Appear on Facebook

Facebook have already taken steps to
filter badly optimised websites out of the news feed, and now they’re
turning their attention to sites which load slowly. As far as Facebook
are concerned, this is a means to make sure people are seeing well
managed, functional websites and those that aren’t have a further
incentive to improve their loading speed. Generally though, they’re just
trying to improve the news feed experience.

Statistically, around 50% of users
will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. Facebook
are simply expanding on that by actually limiting the visibility of
sites which are on the sluggish side. The issue with this is that poor
site loading doesn’t necessarily mean the site is poorly managed, it may
just mean that the site in question doesn’t have enough money to afford
a better server rate.

That being said, Facebook are taking
other factors into account, and the final decision on how well your
website appears on Facebook will be based on a mixture of different
things, including how often users actually click on links, like or share
them. In this since, users will still see content relevant to them,
even if it does load slowly, just not quite as high up on the list as
might otherwise have been.

This change won’t come into effect
for another month, a deliberate decision on Facebook’s part – they’re
giving site managers time to address their loading speed issues. At this
point, it’s just another addition to the long list of things that site
runners need to account for when they’re making sure that their content
is properly optimised for Facebook promotion, which itself is doubly
important now that Facebook has surpassed 2 billion users worldwide.

The change is taking place across
all formats, but there’s a particular focus on mobile users. Facebook
have been fielding complaints that things aren’t loading quickly enough
when accessed through the app, which may well have been the thing that
sparked this change in the first place. Generally though, all the
changes Facebook make are geared more towards mobile users, as they are
trying to court users to spend as much time on the app version of the
platform as possible.